Page 98

Lucien

I t wasn’t Jamie who answered the door.

Luc eyed the female bartender from the night before, doing his best to keep his lip from curling.

He had nothing specific against her per se—nothing except her closed-mindedness about supernatural powers and the fact that she was another recipient of Jamie’s smiles—she just wasn’t who he wanted to see right now.

Monique tilted her head back into the house without taking her eyes off him. “Jamie! Your dude’s here!” She lifted a brow at him. “Rehearsal run late?”

It took a moment for Luc to understand the reference. Rehearsal? Ah, yes. He hadn’t put his sunglasses back on.

He knew Jamie liked to see his eyes.

“Something like that,” Luc answered, listening for the sounds of Jamie approaching. He found himself almost breathless with anticipation at the soft thuds of footsteps, the monster inside him whining softly with need.

Which was ridiculous, honestly. They’d seen him only hours before. It wasn’t like they were being reunited after years of separation.

And then there he was, green hair mussed, wearing loose, soft-looking shorts and a short-sleeved button-up left carelessly unbuttoned and fluttering loose at his sides, slim, tawny chest on display.

Luc growled softly at the sight.

Monique stared. “Dude.”

Jamie grinned around the toothpick he held between his teeth.

Cinnamon-flavored, from the smell of it.

His smile didn’t reach his eyes though. It wasn’t the real smile, the one that Luc saw every time he closed his eyes now.

“Oh, don’t mind him,” Jamie said flatly.

“He’s just frustrated with what he can’t have. ”

Luc was too distracted by the sight of the man in front of him to take proper heed of the warning.

Was Jamie’s scent saturated with cinnamon because of all the cinnamon-flavored accessories he put in his mouth, or did he gravitate toward cinnamon because that was his underlying scent?

Luc wasn’t sure the order of things. He felt a strange urge to know for sure.

He wanted to taste Jamie’s skin. His blood. His cum.

“Ohh, you fucked up, didn’t you?” Monique arched another brow at Luc before turning to Jamie. “Need me to stay?”

Jamie shook his head, his gaze still focused on Luc. “We’re good here. Somebody’s got some groveling to do.”

Monique laughed softly, grabbing her purse from the hallway table. “Off to Alice’s, then.” She gave Jamie a kiss on the cheek, and Luc barely held back another growl at their proximity, forcing himself to rein it in and step back to allow her exit.

And then Jamie was filling the doorway, his arms crossed over that delicious bare chest. “You disappeared,” he accused.

There was nothing to do but admit fault. “I did.”

“I was going to have you meet Mamá.”

“You were.”

Jamie took the cinnamon toothpick out of his mouth, his nostrils flaring. “That’s important to me. My family’s important to me.”

Luc offered truth for truth. “My family hated me.”

Jamie’s head jerked back as if struck. Then he sighed deeply, his dark eyes scanning Luc’s face, searching for something. Luc wished he knew what. Luc would give it to him. He would.

Finally Jamie popped the toothpick back in his mouth and stepped back from the doorway, gesturing expansively with one arm. “Come on in, monster.”

Luc felt like a little puppy as he obediently followed Jamie into his bedroom, close on the human’s heels. He wasn’t used to feeling so…contrite. Usually Luc just reacted. Wildly. Often badly. And then he paid the consequences, whatever those may be. He’d never wanted to atone before.

It really was an awful feeling.

Jamie’s bedroom was a mess. A horrifying, awe-inspiring mess.

His bed was a nest of tangled sheets, unmade and possibly unwashed.

There were piles of paperbacks strewn haphazardly about the room, not a proper bookshelf in sight.

The only area of order in the chaos was a large desk by the window, with what looked to be an extremely expensive computer setup.

Jamie shot a glance to where Luc was staring at the incongruity. “I’m a freelance programmer,” he explained. “I like my workspace neat.”

Luc swallowed a cough. Jamie gave him a look but said nothing, worrying the toothpick between his teeth. He started meandering from corner to corner of the room, picking up books as he went.

“Shall we sit?” Luc asked in his most polite tone.

Jamie grunted a negative. “I listen better when I’m moving. Talk. I’m all ears.”

Luc supposed the confession— my family hated me —wasn’t enough on its own to earn forgiveness for his blunder, but he didn’t know where to begin.

Had he really thought he’d just show up and Jamie would welcome him back with open arms?

He had, hadn’t he? Jamie had been nothing but open. It was Luc who was closed off.

He clearly needed to make some concessions.

Luc sat down gingerly on a corner of the bed.

“I was a second son. Unwanted and unremarkable. Although, it didn’t really matter what I accomplished anyway.

My parents were uninterested; my brother considered me a nuisance.

I thought I’d be able to—to rectify that, I suppose, when I was older.

I thought I’d find a woman, have a family of my own.

People to love me. In the meantime, I tried to make a career as a soldier, fought for Napoleon, in one of his earlier campaigns. And then I died.”

“Just casually dropping that he fought for fucking Napoleon,” Jamie muttered. But then he nodded for Luc to continue as Jamie stacked more books, making little towers of paperbacks on one side of the room. His lovely face was uncharacteristically serious.

“I was saved at the very end, by what I thought was an angel at the time.” Luc gave a bitter laugh. “I remember him perfectly in that moment, pure-white hair backlit by the sun. A heavenly apparition, I thought.”

Jamie snorted at that part.

Luc supposed that was fair. He’d been very foolish, there on his battleground deathbed.

“Even after I realized I’d been turned by a demon, I still thought at first I’d been…

chosen. To be a companion, a partner. But it turns out it was only a last lark for someone on their way out the door.

A semiferal monster who taught me the basics and then left me to go die. ”

Luc ran his fingertips along the sheets of Jamie’s bed, unimpressed with the quality.

He’d provide something finer, later down the line.

“It was a decade before I found someone of my own for a companion. I chose someone predictably similar to myself, I suppose. Same tragic situation, dying out there on a battlefield. Even fighting for the same man, only a decade later. I must have thought we’d bond over all that. And we did, for a time.”

Luc cleared his throat. Why was it still so painful, to think of those early days with Roman?

Why couldn’t he let it go, this chosen family who had changed his mind?

“I told myself he chose me. A life by my side. But I was fooling myself. I’d given him the option of death or me…

It wasn’t really a choice at all. And when I inevitably fucked it all up, he ran away.

Never forgave me. Never will. And why would he? ”

Jamie had paused in his whirl of cleaning, his whole focus back on Luc. “How did you fuck it all up?” he asked.

In for a penny, in for a pound. “I thought I’d found my mate, but she…

rejected me…in the end. I blamed Roman. I blamed him for not turning her against her will, as I would have.

I tried to end his existence.” Luc found himself clearing his throat again.

“Multiple times. Plus a little light stalking.” A pause. “ Persistent stalking.”

Luc watched carefully, waiting for the censure to cross Jamie’s face, but the human only cocked his head, flicking his toothpick to the other side of his mouth thoughtfully.

In the face of that silence, Luc kept right on sharing.

Because apparently this was his new reality.

Feelings and communication and baring his soul to be judged as worthy or worthless.

“Everyone who’s ever met me has known something was wrong with me,” he stated bluntly.

“That something was…lacking. Except you.” Luc knew the expression on his face had turned unbearably soft, but he couldn’t help it.

“You who don’t know half the things I’ve done but seem to have forgiven me preemptively for them.

You who have no reason to trust me. To believe in me.

To meet your family…” Luc shrugged helplessly, his gaze down on his own hands, which had formed into fists on his thighs.

“They’d know too. In an instant, they’d know I wasn’t right for someone they love. ”

And there it was. More or less all of it.

Luc had basically scooped his heart out from his chest and presented it to the human on a platter.

Or at least, as best he could in one ten-minute monologue.

There were details missing, sure. The sheer number of dead bodies Luc had left in his wake, for one.

But Luc knew without knowing how that Jamie cared less about that than he did about the why .

About what made Luc tick, all the broken pieces underneath the monstrous exterior.

Jamie gave open honesty and wanted an equal exchange.

Luc looked up from his hands to see Jamie had lost the toothpick and was standing with an uncharacteristic stillness across the room, a thoughtful expression on his face.

His silence lasted long enough that Luc started to expect condemnation, but when Jamie spoke, his words came out soft and flat, oddly emotionless.

“My dad left when I was a kid. He chose a different wife. A different family. He’s got two other sons now, in California.

I’m sure he shows up to all their soccer games, like the perfect father. He’s never once called me.”